Restoration of my Great Grand Fathers 1928 Morris Cowley Colonial By Bill Heard I started the restoration of my Great Grand Fathers 1928 Morris Cowley Colonial in March 2020. I contributed an article about the start of the restoration, in the June 2020 Klaxon edition, so I now continue with the challenge of restoring the motor. After I had freed up 2 stuck valves, I was able to turn the crank shaft over, to allow my brother & I to remove the springs from the pins holding the clutch plates onto the fly wheel. We then removed the gear box & delivered the motor to a Tauranga motor engineer. Then Covid struck.
The Motor Restoration Starts – May 2020 So after the first Covid lockdown when it was possible to visit the motor engineer, I called to check the progress, & we agreed that they would strip the engine & send the block to Rotorua, to dip into an acid bath to flush the water galleries & generally clean it. A couple of days later, I got a call from them to say that I had better call around as there were some issues. So around I went, & I was expecting to hear that the block was cracked. NO. A terrible repair had been made many years ago. One piston had been welded & another was in a poor state & bearings were badly worn. I returned days later with a box of old pistons & new valves & gudgeon pins, hoping that these parts would be machined to recondition the motor. I had also mentioned earlier that I had a spare motor. Days later I was asked if I could take in the spare motor & would it be ok if the parts could be shared to make one motor. I said yes. Meantime I had joined the Bullnose Morris Club UK, where they had the factory records of the car, & the day that it was manufactured. I also found out that the car was a Colonial model, which had a wider wheel track & the larger Oxford motor (the Cowley had a bore of 69mm & the Oxford 75mm). So armed with this information, I visited the engineer & photographed both engine numbers & found out that the spare motor was the original one & decided that this was the one to be restored.
The Cowley motor is lifted off the chassis Broken pistons
So the days roll on by & I was asked if it was possible to obtain new pistons, valves & valve guides. So parts were purchased from the UK & Australia. Meantime the Tga motor engineer had made some progress on restoring the engine, & then he hit a road block - the new valve guides, valves & springs were fitted to the nice clean block, which had been through the acid bath & I was now asked if I could get new bearing shells for the conrods, plus the main bearings needed to be re-metalled, & as this is a specialist job, which in the past was only undertaken by a few people (most now deceased) he had to track someone down. 4
